Laurel Moon is a literary magazine published by undergraduates, for undergraduates.

submission guidelines

editorial vision

"Tell it slant." "Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." Brandeis University was founded to embrace the marginalized, and Laurel Moon seeks to do the same. Send us your deepest, truest work.

Please read our submission guidelines thoroughly, all the way to the bottom of the page before submitting your work and feel free to email us if you have any questions at all.

Laurel Moon publishes twice a year, in the spring and the fall.

eligibility & deadlines

Undergraduates at all US colleges and universities, including community colleges, are invited to submit work. All writers whose work is selected for publication will be required to provide proof of enrollment showing active enrollment towards a degree.

Laurel Moon accepts submissions every year in the spring from January 1st to March 15th and in the fall from September 1st to October 15th. Submissions close at 11:59PM Eastern time. We encourage early submissions, and often will offer a limited number of critique slots to writers who submit in the first four weeks of the submission period.

how to submit

Please submit all works to laurelmoonbrandeis@gmail.com. All submissions from one author (prose and poetry) should be combined into one .docx or .rtf file. Poems with special formatting (eg. shape poems) may be submitted as PDF files. For prose works, please indicate a word count and a genre (i.e., fiction or creative nonfiction) in the top right-hand corner of each piece.

In the body of your email, please include a cover letter with the following information:The higher education institution at which you are currently enrolledA brief, third person biographical note (no more than 50 words)Whether or not this is a simultaneous submission

Note that Laurel Moon submissions are read blind, so please do not include your name anywhere on the submission file itself.

requesting feedback

Laurel Moon accepts up to two writers who request one-on-one feedback for an idea they wish to expand upon. Please include whether you are interested in being considered for this option in the body of your email as well as a synopsis of your creative idea.

english poetry

Laurel Moon will consider up to five poems from the same author, with a cumulative line count of no more than 200 lines.

english prose

Laurel Moon will consider up to three prose works from the same author, with a cumulative word count of no more than 7,000 words and an individual count of no more than 5,000 words per individual work. Please indicate a word count and genre (fiction or nonfiction) on each prose submission.

english scripts, &c.

Laurel Moon welcomes submissions of other word-based forms of art. Please limit radio, stage, and screenplay submissions to five pages each, fifteen pages total. For submissions any format not listed here, shoot us an email and we will let you know how to send it.

a note on political writing

Laurel Moon often publishes work that could be called political--work that is feminist or queer or anti-racist, for instance--but with caveats. First, we do not publish manifestos, which we define as works that dedicate themselves solely to explicating a political position or describing a social ill. Second, we typically do not publish occasional works about political figures or moments, unless it seems like this work would still resonate in five to ten years. Third, our editorial taste veers away from tragedy porn, queerbashing, and other sensationalized works that capitalize on the suffering of marginalized people. We want to feel the pain ourselves as readers--not rubberneck someone else's suffering.

prizes

Laurel Moon is pleased to offer two prizes for Brandeis University undergraduate writers, the Grossbardt Memorial Poetry Prize and the Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit Fiction Prize. Any piece published in the magazine by a Brandeis University undergraduate will be automatically considered for these prizes by a judge determined by the Brandeis University Department of English.

Laurel Moon participates in plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing, an anthology published by Virginia Commonwealth University (previously published by Bennington College). This means that after publishing each issue of the magazine, we send a copy to plain china, who may then approach authors and seek to re-publish their work. All pieces published in Laurel Moon are automatically considered by plain china.

compensation & rights

At this time, Laurel Moon is not able to offer compensation for published pieces. Should your piece be accepted, we will ask for First North American Serial Rights. All rights revert back to the author following publication, with the stipulation that if your piece is published again elsewhere, you indicate that it was first published in Laurel Moon. We may ask additionally for the right to use your piece in our online and print marketing for the 12 months following its publication; refusing to give this permission will not disqualify your work from appearing in our print and online magazine.

Laurel Moon does not consider work that has been previously published in a print or online publication of any kind. This includes blogs and social media. We would like to remind writers that it is their responsibility to inform Laurel Moon immediately if their work has been accepted by another publication. We take the rights of other publications very seriously writers who are found to have neglected this responsibility will be banned from future publication in Laurel Moon.